JUDGMENT

1. This hearing has been done through hybrid mode.

Brief Facts

2. The present appeal was originally filed before the IPAB in the year 2020 and transferred to this Court upon the enactment of the Tribunals Reforms Act, 2021. Vide order sheet dated 14th September, 2020, notice was issued in this appeal in the proceedings before the IPAB. Thereafter, notice has also been issued by this Court vide order dated 23rd November, 2022.

3. The present appeal, has been filed under Section 117A of the Patents Act, 1970 (hereinafter ‘the Act’) by the Appellant- Raytheon Company challenging the impugned order dated 17th October, 2019 by which the Appellant’s application for grant of a patent has been refused by the ld. Assistant Controller of Patents and Designs (hereinafter ‘Controller’) under Section 15 of the Act. The patent application of the Appellant bearing application number 4075/DELNP/2007 titled ‘Scheduling in a High- Performance Computing System’ (hereinafter ‘subject patent’) has been refused by the ld. Assistant Controller of Patents and Designs under Section

15 of the Act.

4. The subject patent was filed before the Indian Patent Office on 30th May, 2007 as a PCT national phase application with International Filing Date of 12th April, 2005, claiming priority from a US Patent Application with the earliest priority date of 17th November, 2004. The impugned order refused the grant of the subject patent on the following grounds:

• Lack of inventive step; and • Non-Patentability under Section 3(k) of the Act.

Submissions

5. Mr. Vineet Rohilla, ld. Counsel appearing for the Appellant submits that there is a fundamental error in the impugned order i.e., that the ld. Controller has unfortunately followed the outdated Computer Related Invention Guidelines (CRI) Guidelines of 2016, dated 19th February, 2016, instead of the updated CRI Guidelines of 2017. The Appellant has also filed a written note of arguments in support of its contention that the subject patent application ought to be granted by this Court.

6. The Appellant claims that the subject patent application relates to the domain of High-Performance Computing (HPC), which is used by scientists and engineers for modelling, simulating, and analysing complex physical or algorithmic phenomena. It is averred by the Appellant that performance of HPC systems is chiefly determined by parallel scalability which is often a limiting factor. Scalability itself is based on the following factors:

• Hardware;

• Memory input/output (I/O), communication bandwidth;

• Software;

• Architecture; • Applications.

7. According to the Appellants, the problem to be solved by the subject patent application is that in typical HPC setups, there are imbalances between processing, memory, and I/O bandwidth which resultantly hinder scalability. Many HPC environments lack sufficient I/O bandwidth for high- end data processing and often include unnecessary components that reduce reliability. As per the Appellant, due to these problems, many HPC environments may not be able to provide robust cluster management software for efficient operation in product-oriented environments. It is the case of the Appellant, that these problems are solved by the subject patent application.

8. The Appellant claims that the subject patent application solves not only the aforementioned problem but also the problems of the prior art. It is claimed that one of the embodiments involves the use of an 'aggressive flag,' which sets a limit on hop counts between a pair of nodes when a 'spatial request' is allocated as a 'compact request' and allocates a compact combination of nodes to the request if the maximum hop count falls within the specified limit on hop counts. Page 21 and Page 22 of the Complete Specification is relied upon in support of this assertion. The Appellant asserts that the subject patent application provides an advanced solution for a ‘spatial request’ to be allocated as a ‘compact request’ exclusively upon the assurance of a